"Return of the indies," reads the banner outside Kyoto's Miyako Messe, the host location for this year's BitSummit. True enough, the event was back for its third year, but Japanese indies hadn't really gone anywhere. The scene may have been scattered and relegated to the shadows before the BitRider came along and gave it a shot of adrenaline, but the familiar faces in the crowd suggested these indies have always been here.

It was apropos then, late in the afternoon on the opening day, July 11th, that someone watching Triangle Service's Toshiaki Fujino give a presentation about his experiences in the industry might have also spotted Sony Computer Entertainment President of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida listening along, or spied a glimpse of famed Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi.

There have only been a few times, if ever, anyone could've imagined a independent games festival in Japan attracting hordes of fans, international media, and luminaries such as Igarashi, or Mega Man co-designer Keiji Inafune, let alone a high-ranking executive from a major gaming company. It was a testament to how bright the spotlight is becoming.

Endless flyer Race the Sun is free today for PC, Mac and Linux on Steam.

This is in honour of developer Flippfly releasing the iOS version of its ambient score-chasing arcade game. You can snag that for £3.99 / $4.99.

Race the Sun also just received its Sunrise DLC. "This beautiful new mode has all the speed of the original but without a setting sun, an increasing difficulty, or a leaderboard," Flippfly noted on Steam. "Just settle in and zone out for one infinite region of bliss."

Like its iOS brethren, the Android version of Fallout Shelter will be free to download with in-app purchases.

Furthermore, all versions of Fallout Shelter will receive new updates shortly, including servant bot Mr. Handy as a premium reward. "Have him collect resources inside your Vault, send him into the wasteland to collect loot, and defend your Vault from creatures and disasters, including all new Deathclaw invasions and Molerat infestations," Bethesda teased on its official blog.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition is now available as a free download on both iOS and Android tablets.

This remake of Jane Jensen's classic southern gothic point-and-click adventure launched last October on PC and Mac. That version costs £12.99 / $19.99, while the mobile edition is free to begin, but contains in-app purchases to unlock further sections of the story. That being said, unlocking the full thing will still only cost $7 (About £5).

Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition adds high-res 3D graphics, a reorchestrated soundtrack, more puzzles and scenes, a new hint system, and all new behind-the-scenes content.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1770024Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:58:00 +0100Hearthstone's next expansion is all about the Hero Power

UPDATE 23/7/15 8.00am: Blizzard has now announced UK pricing for The Grand Tournament's pre-purchase offer, which costs £34.99 on PC, Mac and Android.

£34.99 is the standard price of 40 card packs, but this offer will net you 50 Grand Tournament packs when they launch plus a special card back.

Last year game developer Asher Vollmer released a deceptively addictive tile puzzler called Threes. We, especially Wes, really liked it. Today, Vollmer revealed on Twitter that the free version he released last month doubled his daily income.

Vollmer even made a nifty graph comparing the revenue from Threes' free version to that of its £2.29 / $2.99 paid brethren. As you can see, the free version ended up being a smidge more lucrative that its pay-to-play counterpart, at least for the month of June.

I meet the man trying to fix 22cans in the bar of the Hilton Brighton Metropole. The Develop conference is happening all around us, although at a slower pace this morning, because last night everyone went out for a drink.

Well, not everyone. Simon Phillips, the new CEO of 22cans, didn't. Simon is alert and ready to talk in detail about 22cans. Immediately I sense he'll be up for what's to come, which is great, because there's a lot to work through.

22cans is perhaps the most controversial game developer in the UK. Ever since Godus, which Peter Molyneux Kickstarted to the tune of half a million pounds, launched on Steam as an Early Access title in September 2013, 22cans has faced criticism. We'd hoped Godus would rekindle the god game genre. What we got was a PC port of a middling free-to-download mobile game. We felt duped.

Turn-based strategy game Warhammer 40K: Deathwatch comes out Thursday, 16th July on the App Store.

Deathwatch, from Warhammer Quest maker Rodeo Games, was built with Unreal Engine 4. You control a squad of Space Marines special operatives called Deathwatch and battle Tyranids. Gameplay is similar to Warhammer Quest, but Deathwatch is full 3D, so you can spin, pan and rotate the camera.

You use action points to move your Space Marines and shoot the horrible Tyranids, collecting Wargear and new Deathwatch Marines as you complete missions. You earn experience points and spend them on upgrading stats and unlocking abilities.

There's a new expansion for fantasy role-playing game Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition in the works.

Siege of Dragonspear adds a new chapter to the Bhaalspawn saga, developer Beamdog has announced. It's set between Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, and, according to Beamdog, offers around 25 hours of gameplay. You need to own Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition to play it.

You can import your character or saved game from Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition into Siege of Dragonspear, and, usefully, you can continue your adventure by exporting your Siege of Dragonspear game to Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition.

Historical episodic adventure 1979 Revolution, a game about the events surrounding Iran's cultural revolution, is now set to release its debut episode, Black Friday, this autumn on PC, Mac, iOS, Android and "consoles".

Developer Ink Stories creative director Navid Khonsari confirmed to Eurogamer that he's in talks with Sony and Microsoft about console releases, but the final details have yet to be sorted.

In the meantime, 1979 Revolution has launched a Steam Greenlight campaign, where the following new trailer shows off how the game is shaping up.

Just Cause 3 and Mad Max developer Avalanche Studios has just released its first mobile game, Rumble City.

Available today as a free title with in-app purchases on Android and Amazon devices, Rumble City is coming to iOS platforms on Thursday, 9th July.

Unlike Avalanche's usual action fare, Rumble City is a turn-based strategy game. The developer described this smaller outing as "a passion project for a small strike team with a deep affection for tactical gameplay and 1960's American biker culture."

Everyone's talking about Her Story, aren't they? And I don't know about you, but when everyone else is talking about something, it's essential that I wade in there, my jaw rotating in all three axes. And when I've built a hot orb of opinion plasma about the size of an R-Type charge shot, it's time to jam my freshly minted tuppence into the spinning doors of public discourse. And you can take that metaphor to the bank.

Before I lift up your wrist and honk my dazzling thinks into your armpit, let me first describe Her Story. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, made out of video clips of a fragmented police interview. The clips are accessed through a basic search engine, which trawls through the transcripts and returns you the first five clips with that word in. Imagine a jigsaw where you can't see all the pieces. You just shout "corners", and the four corners fire from the box into your face. Pleased with results so far, you say "edge bits", but thanks to those suspicious limitations, it spits out five edge bits that don't even join up. So you put them on a Scrabble rack and say "sky?"

Zen Studios has unveiled an Ant-Man cabinet as the latest add-on for its virtual pinball catalogue that includes Zen Pinball 2, Pinball FX2 and Marvel Pinball.

Based on the upcoming Paul Rudd movie, which is in and of itself based on a comic-book about a shrinking man named Scott Lang, Zen's Ant-Man table lets players reenact the hero's trials and tribulations fighting Yellowjacket in fierce pinball combat. Sure, that may seem silly to us, but a pinball's got to be like that boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark to an ant, so this is serious business for our tiny hero.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1765536Wed, 01 Jul 2015 14:24:00 +0100There's a new London studio making an amazing looking racing game

Following the astronomical success of CSR Racing, NaturalMotion is unsurprisingly ploughing ahead with a sequel - CSR2 - being built by an all-new studio that takes in some veterans of the racing game scene. It's a mobile game, of course, and it's free-to-play - but it is an exceptionally good looking mobile game.

"With CSR Racing, the remit was to make this the best looking game on mobile," NaturalMotion's CEO Torsten Reil told Eurogamer at a recent preview event. "With CSR2, the remit is make it the best looking racing game full stop. We have so much processing power we really can make it look amazing. We think we have console level, and in some cases we go beyond console, but it's still a mobile game. It's a big step, and we're quite proud of it."

CSR2's being developed by NaturalMotion's new London East studio, headed up by former Codemasters Racing employee Julian Widdows, and it boasts a level of fidelity that's on par with current console games - its cars can even boast of being rendered in a higher resolution to those we see on the PS4.

Fallout Shelter has introduced its first character from the upcoming Fallout 4.

Available as a random card in lunchboxes - the Fallout parlance for treasure chest, acquired via in-game currency or real money microtransactions - the new cast member is named Preston Garvey. Described on the Bethesda Blog as a "Legendary Dweller" of the Commonwealth Minutemen, Preston sports a nifty Laser Musket.

Here's how he looks in both Fallout Shelter and in Fallout 4, where he brandishes his trademark weapon:

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1765385Tue, 30 Jun 2015 21:58:00 +0100Mojang is shuttering development on its card combat game Scrolls

.

Minecreaft developer Mojang's card-combat game Scrolls isn't going to receive any additional content since its Echoes update earlier this month.

"After much deliberation, we've come to an important decision that we'd like to share: Echoes will be the last major content patch for Scrolls," Mojang said on its official blog. "We won't be adding features or sets from now on, though we are planning to keep a close eye on game balance."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1765162Mon, 29 Jun 2015 19:46:00 +0100The World Ends With You is back on iOS

Square Enix's cult classic modern RPG The World Ends With You has returned to the iOS App Store after a four month absence.

This iOS version, entitled The World Ends with You: Solo Remix, faced erasure from the App Store in February due to compatibility issues with iOS 8. Due to this incompatibility, the game wasn't even available for re-download if players deleted it from their iOS device and wanted to reclaim it.

This mobile adaptation of The World Ends With You isn't cheap, however, as it's still priced at £13.49 / $17.99.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1765095Mon, 29 Jun 2015 15:39:00 +0100Video: Why you might like to play Her Story

It's difficult to talk about a thing like Her Story without edging into spoiler territory. This is a game that relies so heavily on the player making their own discoveries and we don't want to spoil that. Just imagine the comments section.

Right, we'll give it a shot. Join Christian Donlan and myself below, as we avoid the narrative, but instead focus on the similarities between Her Story and surprisingly, the board game Battleships.

There are plenty of skiing games on iOS, and they all, I am sure, benefit in a quiet way from the fact that skiing is famously the most entertaining of words to look at when it is written down, what with that wacky double I right in the middle, invoking, if you are open to it, the twin tracks you leave in your frosty wake. Sure, all of this is true, but there is only one Skiing Yeti Mountain, and in a selfish way, I am very glad of that. Featherweight's game strikes me as the kind of thing that has probably done rather well for itself, and yet when I settle down on the bus to play it on the way back from work, it still feels like a secret, a rarity, beloved by a lucky few initiates. Join us!

Yes yes yes, the controls are uncommonly simple and precise, allowing the touchscreen to get out of the way, as it were, as your thumb becomes both your tiny skier's centre of gravity and their sense of connection to the snow beneath them. Yes, the structure is lovely, slalom flags giving each short course a kind of tricksy dynamism while the timer converts your swiftness into XP if you can work with sufficient care. These things are what makes Skiing Yeti Mountain a great game about skiing, but the things that make it a truly mesmerising experience that I look forward to every evening lie elsewhere.

Firstly, it's the fact that, as far as I can tell, each individual course forms part of a single unbroken trip down a mountain that seems to just go on forever. This is a tiny detail, and the later game may prove it incorrect, but it feels huge to me at the moment, delivering a welcome feeling of remoteness even as I am wedged in amongst other commuters, and making me believe that I am somewhere strange and lofty and slightly forsaken.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1764815Mon, 29 Jun 2015 08:00:00 +0100Her Story makes game narratives personal - and that feels like the future

Fabula and syuzhet are two words that won't net you any sweet esults if you type them into Her Story's antiquated database, but together they're the smoking gun regardless, and a big part of the reason that this audacious caper works as well as it does. They're entertaining words in their own right, of course, fun to say and fun to deploy in text, but when paired they unlock a lot of the magical potential of narrative itself - magic that Her Story relies upon to construct its wayward tale.

They're literary terms, fabula meaning the narrative events when laid out in strict chronological order, while syuzhet refers to the arrangement in which those events are actually delivered to the audience, once they've been artfully chopped around to provide optimal impact. Crucially, for a piece of storytelling to really sing, both fabula and syuzhet need to be perfectly constructed - and these days, that can even come down to knowing when a tale has that strange straight-ahead power that means the fabula should be left as it is. F*** you, Soderbergh.

It is the handling of this delicate relationship that makes Her Story such an exhilarating experience, as it essentially passes control of the syuzhet over to the player - or a second layer of syuzhet, anyway, since the pieces you're putting together are already one step removed from the original flow of events by the time you get to them. Even before you start to explore the fascinating, and rather devastating theme of the piece - which I won't spoil here - Her Story's already a riot of beloved literary ideas, in other words, all brought to fresh life as a video game. To work its tricks, the game drops you in front of the desktop of a mid-90s computer terminal and allows you to poke through the scrambled remains of a series of interviews that took place over 20 years ago - but it does not grant access to the chronological timeline of the original interviews. Instead, you can search for keywords that will call forth specific clips, and these will assert their own non-linear order to the story. Depending on the keywords you choose, you will get the truth - which is particularly problematic here in the first place - delivered in any number of ways.

Oft considered a racist symbol, Apple recently cracked down on dev's use of the flag in apps following the recent Charleston, South Carolina shooting in which a white man opened fire upon an African American church.

Today, one such removed game, Ultimate General: Gettysburg, has been reinstated on the App Store.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1764877Fri, 26 Jun 2015 23:27:00 +0100Apple is removing games with the Confederate flag from the App Store

UPDATE 26/06/2015 4.52am: We've acquired a couple of statements from game developers affected by this.

Ultimate General: Gettysburg's lead game designer Nick Thomadis over at Game Labs told Eurogamer, "They [Apple] notified us during the night of 24th about the removal of the game, as probably any other developer. I want to state that Apple was very, polite and professional when communicating to us."

"Also an interesting fact is that Valve has put our game on the main store page yesterday."

Editor's note: Our review is very light on narrative details, but if you want to head into Her Story with completely fresh eyes be warned there are very mild spoilers below.

During the summer of June 1994 Hannah Smith reported her husband, Simon, as missing. The missing person file was, shortly thereafter, stamped with murder. We don't know whether or not the case was solved at the time, but in Her Story, the latest game from Sam Barlow - designer of Aisle and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - you're given access to the historic interview tapes. The database, a mess buried inside the tape archive at Portsmouth police station's homicide department, holds close to three hundred individual clips, spliced from a series of interview sessions with detectives, held during the summer of 1994. You cannot access the clips in chronological sequence. Rather, you must use search terms to query the database. If your chosen term, such as "Robbery" or "Yes, I was there" appears in the transcript of one or more clips in the database, they are presented for viewing.

In this way you begin to dredge through the archive, gradually piecing together the bones of a story about what happened during those weeks. While the information you receive has no particular chronology, something of a meaningful arc emerges naturally, as you use scraps of detail from one clip to inform your next search term. Hannah might mention the name of a co-worker, or of a place that the couple liked to visit, and you hurriedly tap the term into the waiting box, in the hope that it'll fill in further, somehow related blanks.

Lego Minifigures Online, the MMO by The Secret World developer Funcom, is launching on 29th June as a buy-to-play affair.

Its beta was previously available in free-to-play form.

This buy-to-play version will cost $29.99 on PC, Mac and Linux, while its iOS and Android versions will go for $4.99. Granted the mobile versions will only include the first world for that price, but players will be able to purchase additional worlds as in-app purchases. This option will be available at launch for the iOS version, while the Android version's add-on content won't arrive until summer.

Guitar Hero Live will be out on 20th October for PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Wii U, Activision has announced.

It will also arrive on select unannounced mobile devices.

The game bundled with a new guitar controller will retail for $99.99 in North America, so we expect that to be somewhere in the neighborhood of £70 in the UK. We'll update when we get the official UK pricing.

How does this work, you ask? Microsoft debuted the following demo of it at its E3 press conference.

Basically, one person can look at their Minecraft world as a 3D hologram on a table, then scroll around, peer into buildings (by using their real head to clip through the virtual walls), or even elevate the landscape to peruse what lies beneath its surface.

Telltale has announced a new mini-series in its Walking Dead canon based around Michonne, a character in the comic book series.

Due this autumn, this spin-off will be set after the events kicking off Season Two of the game. As such, Michonne will be DLC for Season Two, and you'll have the have the first episode of that season to access it.

This morning, I stuck a load of people underground and made them very unhappy. They are starving, because there is very little food. They are constantly thirsty, because there is almost no water. They are uncommonly well lit, because I accidentally bought two power generators early on, tanking my economy just as it was starting to take flight. Sadly, all my surplus energy really proves is that you cannot eat or drink light.

Oh yes, and these dwellers of mine are not remotely sexy: I put them together in living quarters in friendly pairings and they just stare at each other, dead-eyed and grim. A while back, I sent my best guy out into the wasteland to explore. "I thought I'd never get out of there!" he said as he jogged off, never to be seen again, happier in a deadly radioactive wilderness than he was with me. Joke's on you buddy, I thought. I didn't give you a weapon.

So if you had to pick a single word to describe my style of leadership, it would be neglectful. It always ends up this way, of course. Fallout Shelter was inevitably going to bring out the worst in me. It just did it surprisingly quickly.

The big news came, as expected, from Bethesda. The publisher made an accomplished conference debut with the expected deep-dives into Doom 4, Fallout 4, and Dishonored 2. The surprise of the latter was somewhat spoiled by their accidentally streaming the dress rehearsal on Twitch on Saturday, but it did manage to throw us one curveball with the news that you can play as either Corvo or Emily Kaldwin.